The UAE and Saudi Arabia: The Partnership Endures Despite Oil Dispute

Long-standing but underappreciated differences between the UAE and Saudi Arabia are becoming more obvious, but their continuing shared interests remain decisive.

The ongoing spat between the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, in the context of a dispute over oil production among members of the OPEC+ alliance of producers, is being simultaneously overstated and underestimated in different quarters. The rift is real and significant. But the UAE and Saudi Arabia remain fundamentally affiliated at the regional and international level because they continue to share enough core interests to make them far more often partners than rivals. Yet the differences, some long-standing and others more recent, are significant. So, it’s essential to differentiate between what is and is not happening between these two crucial Gulf Arab powers.

Widespread surprise at the seemingly sudden disagreement between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh is rooted in misapprehension about the relationship between the two countries in recent decades. It has been a common assumption that the UAE and Saudi Arabia have effectively indistinguishable worldviews and interests – that the UAE is sort of an appendage or dependency of Saudi Arabia. That has never been the case.

A number of factors perpetuated this misconception, including the UAE’s determination in the 1990s and 2000s to make partnerships with Saudi Arabia and the United States the cornerstone of its national security strategy. Differences with Saudi Arabia were therefore contained or played down as a matter of policy.

Yet even at moments of maximum cooperation, such as the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, the UAE and Saudi Arabia had overlapping but distinct goals and imperatives. Over time, these differences developed into a clear distinction between the Saudi-led war in the north against the Houthi rebels and a UAE-led effort to pacify the south, balancing among the United Nations-recognized Yemeni government, southern parties and militia groups (some of them secessionist leaning), and a complex battle against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. These separate wars became glaringly clear when the UAE began its phased military drawdown in Yemen in July 2019. The UAE had considerably more success in the southern theater than Saudi Arabia had in the northern one and concluded that continued direct engagement had reached the point of diminishing returns. Yet the UAE was at pains to insist that there was no real difference with Saudi Arabia, even though there clearly was, and Riyadh played along.

The widely circulated narrative that the de facto ruler of the UAE, Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, acts as a mentor to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has also created confusion. This flawed characterization, which is at best an exaggerated caricature, asserted that, through force of personality, Mohammed bin Zayed, despite the UAE’s junior partner status, was often effectively pulling the strings in Riyadh. Not only was that incorrect, it almost certainly added to mutual suspicions, at least between the two leaders. The more complex reality is that, under King Salman bin Abdulaziz and Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia had moved considerably closer to the UAE ideologically in a broad rejection of Islamism as a political orientation among Muslims.

But this was not because of the charisma or personal influence of Mohammed bin Zayed. It was, rather, a strategic reassessment in Riyadh born out of Saudi Arabia’s own interests. And there were always obvious differences. Saudi Arabia cannot reject the interplay of religion and politics as the UAE tries to do, because even as it is shifting to a more populist and nationalist narrative, Saudi Arabia remains deeply invested in its Islamic history and Islam as a social and political text. This was also evident in Yemen where Riyadh saw the Islamist Islah Party as a major local partner while the UAE deeply distrusted the organization even when senior Emirati officials grudgingly agreed to meet with Islah leaders.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia have drifted further apart on regional alliances as well. Saudi Arabia has been engaging in a tentative rapprochement with Turkey, which the UAE views as the leader of a Sunni Islamist regional alliance that has the potential to rival Iran’s Shia Islamist network. Saudi Arabia has tended to see Ankara simply as another worrisome would-be regional hegemon and less of an ideological threat. The divisions between the UAE and Saudi Arabia on Turkey were evident when Saudi Arabia was on the brink of an agreement to end the boycott of Qatar. When the UAE discovered it would not be able to prevent a bilateral deal between Riyadh and Doha, it made a last-minute pitch for a broader Gulf Cooperation Council reconciliation, which was accomplished at a summit in Al Ula in January. Left to its own devices, the UAE may well have preferred to continue the boycott, which it largely viewed in ideological terms seeing Qatar as a key member of Turkey’s fledgling regional network.

These differences have also been evident regarding Iran and Israel. The UAE was quicker to open a dialogue with Iran, and has taken it further, than Saudi Arabia. This is partly because the UAE is much smaller and more vulnerable, particularly to missile attacks, than Saudi Arabia, but also because the UAE sees Iran as one of several regional threats, including Turkey, while Saudi Arabia continues to view Iran as uniquely menacing. Dubai’s long-standing, extensive commercial relationships with Iranian business entities may also have helped shape Abu Dhabi’s threat perceptions regarding Iran.

Saudi Arabia has been clear that it does not object to the UAE’s agreement to normalize relations with Israel, and even reportedly agreed to allow Bahrain, over which Riyadh has substantial sway, to follow suit. But Riyadh has been careful to keep its options open and is weighing the advantages and disadvantages to any such move on its own part. One of the most significant differences here is that Saudi Arabia has regional Arab and global Islamic leadership roles the UAE simply does not. The UAE can act strictly in its own interests with little regard for other constituencies, while Saudi Arabia, sometimes to its own frustration, cannot.

The biggest difference, though, is the one that has given rise to the current OPEC+ dispute. The UAE is much further along than Saudi Arabia in developing the framework for a post-oil economy. Saudi Arabia and Russia, amid several bitter spats, have been using OPEC+ to manage oil pricing, regulating production to benefit their own economies. The UAE has long been seething that it hasn’t been consulted properly and that its concerns are not reflected in production limits. Indeed, while many other oil-producing countries seek to manage pricing over the long run, the UAE wants to monetize its natural resources as quickly as possible to help drive the transition away from a petroleum-based economy. The current OPEC+ arrangement, therefore, isn’t working for Abu Dhabi, and while most analysts seem to think a short-term deal can be struck, these economic differences make it possible to imagine the UAE actually leaving OPEC altogether to free itself from production limitations. It is also easy, however, to appreciate the risks Abu Dhabi could encounter trying to maneuver outside of an OPEC framework, risks that inject a degree of caution into Emirati decision making about any actual exit, as opposed to brinksmanship as a negotiating strategy.

The divisions between the UAE and Saudi Arabia are real and significant, and they have the potential over time to grow into deeper rifts. But any rivals or antagonists hoping that this is the end of the Abu Dhabi- Riyadh partnership may be disappointed. On most issues, at a fundamental level the UAE and Saudi Arabia have broadly compatible goals and can reinforce each other with complementary capabilities. Both are also still within a broad-based pro-United States camp. And, while they see the threats somewhat differently, both have the same major concerns: Iran and its network of regional proxies, Turkey and its budding regional alliance, and the continued threat of extremist and terrorist groups. In a region divided between status quo powers and revisionist forces, the UAE and Saudi Arabia are strongly in the status quo camp.

Economic concerns are often sufficient to draw out and amplify disputes between normally cooperative partners. And there is a fundamental incompatibility between the way the UAE and Saudi Arabia want to manage their energy resources. That’s likely to continue to fuel disagreements. But, even with the various other differences, it is very unlikely to lead to a bitter alienation such as was the case with the dispute with Qatar.

The current dispute is in part the result of a maturation process among Gulf Arab countries. It is quite normal for allied countries to have disagreements that do not rupture their underlying partnership, and economic differences are a typical source. For example, there have been repeated bitter trade quarrels between the United States and Canada. The UAE has been emerging as a more capable international player, and, to some extent, its current willingness to openly quarrel with Saudi Arabia is a function of its growing power. Under such circumstances, long-standing differences are becoming more obvious. But that does not constitute a real break between the UAE and Saudi Arabia or mean the ensuing death of this partnership.

https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-why-saudi-arabia-is-now-in-no-rush-to-recognize-israel-1.9976034

Saudi leaders like Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have focused on the benefits of normalization with Israel. But the recent violence highlighted the downside, which is far more serious for Riyadh than for the UAE or Bahrain.

Given the recent visit to the UAE by Israel’s Foreign Minister, and de facto cabinet leader, Yair Lapid, and fully-realized exchanges of ambassadors, the normalization process initiated last summer under the rubric of the “Abraham Accords” seems virtually irreversible.

That this progress is happening in the immediate aftermath of the latest spasm of Israeli-Palestinian violence clearly indicates that that tension was not close to sufficient to derailing the process.

The current situation remains in a honeymoon stage, with both Emirati and Israeli societies primarily excited by new economic, cultural and, above all, strategic opportunities.

But honeymoons don’t last forever. Signs of what could go wrong or at least cast a much deeper shadow over the relationship certainly did emerge. So Israel is on notice about where Gulf Arab sensitivities persist, even in the midst of a strategic rapprochement.

The biggest problem was at the beginning of the violence centered in Jerusalem. The core of the last outbreak was the ongoing effort to evict six Palestinian families from an area of occupied East Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah, where they have lived since arriving in the city as refugees in 1948.

It became much more awkward for the UAE, Bahrain, and even those Arab countries contemplating normalization with Israel when heavily armed Israeli troops stormed the Al-Aqsa mosque, purportedly looking for caches of stones intended for demonstrators to throw at Israeli troops or worshipers. The unprecedented mobile phone footage of teargas and stun grenades inside the mosque proved extremely awkward for the UAE and Bahrain.

Both countries were compelled to issue stronger statements than they surely otherwise would have liked, denouncing the violence and calling for protection of the inviolability of holy places. Obviously Islamic sensitivities regarding the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, are well known, and their ability to shift the diplomatic position of the UAE, in particular, ought to be carefully noted.

So should the immediate rush by Mohammed bin Zayed, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the UAE, to embrace and reinforce Jordan’s position and authority as the custodian of the Muslim and Christian holy places in occupied East Jerusalem. The role of Jordan in helping to shape and set boundaries for Gulf Arab responses to unrest in Jerusalem cannot be underestimated.

The slight diplomatic tremor between the UAE and Israel would have become much more pronounced if the Jordanians had begun making categorical political and diplomatic moves to register extreme anger at the events.

Had the Jordanians, for example, recalled their ambassador to Israel, or expelled Israel’s ambassador from Jordan, the UAE’s hand would undoubtedly have been forced. What, exactly, they would have felt compelled to do is unclear, but that they would have had to take tangible steps to reinforce and echo Jordan’s position seems almost uncontestable.

But it’s not just the venerable holy places that are problematic. The attempted evictions in Sheikh Jarrah and another, similar, neighborhood, Silwan, encapsulate almost all the most crucial aspects of the Palestinian, and by extension Arab, narrative about Israel, its founding, its relationship with Palestinians in general, and the occupation in particular.

Because the targeted residents were refugees from 1948 already, the specter of them being once again expelled strongly reinforces the Palestinian narrative of dispossession and forcible displacement.

Because similar groups are acting under Israeli laws that allow Jews, but not ever Palestinians, to try to reclaim areas lost in 1947-1948, discrimination against Arabs, including Arab citizens of Israel, by the Israeli state could hardly be more powerfully illustrated.

It reinforces widely-shared Arab instincts to view the founding of Israel as in large part a giant land-grab against existing Arab owners and residents in the 1940s.

And that narrative, particularly reinforced, appears to validate the standard Arab interpretation of the post-1967 occupation as in essence perpetuated to violently seize land and homes from Palestinians, albeit often in a piecemeal fashion, and transfer them to Jewish Israelis, especially in strategically and culturally significant areas.

When Hamas intervened after the first two or three days of unrest in Jerusalem, and by launching a barrage of missiles towards Israel made the issue once again about them and primarily about competing aerial bombardments between Israel and Gaza-based militants, the Abraham Accord countries were effectively taken off the hook.

There was still a great deal of sympathy for Palestinian civilians and anger at Israel’s disproportionate and sometimes indiscriminate bombardments. But there was also dismay, as usual, at the conduct of Hamas, which especially in the UAE is widely viewed as a terrorist organization.

In effect, the Gulf countries were able to throw up their hands and implicitly say that here was yet another senseless war between a belligerent and recalcitrant Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, trying to save his own political skin by fueling another conflict with Palestinians, versus a fanatical and extremist Palestinian group in the thrall of Turkey and, to a lesser extent, Iran.

Under such circumstances, the narrative implicitly holds, there is very little, if anything, the Gulf could have done to prevent or attenuate the conflict once it began.

The lessons of recent weeks are obvious.

First, the normalization agreements are strategic decisions that are robust and enduring and that can, and will, withstand significant stress.

Second, unrest in Jerusalem, whether in holy places or otherwise, presents a completely different strain than events in the far less evocative Gaza, and is especially differentiated from anything that involves or can be laid at the doorstep of Hamas.

Third, Saudi leaders were undoubtedly watching carefully and calculating how much more difficult it would’ve been for them had they already normalized relations with Israel.

The existing agreements are fairly secure and were not really threatened by the unrest. But probably the most significant impact of the fighting was the way it undoubtedly focused minds in Riyadh on the potential downside to Saudi Arabia’s own possible normalization with Israel.

Saudi leaders were already well aware that they have Arab regional and Islamic global leadership roles that would have been significantly strained by the normalization process. And Saudi Arabia has a far larger, more complex and more brittle political architecture than its smaller neighbors.

In recent years, it’s likely Saudi leaders like Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman were largely focused on the potential benefits of a possible opening to Israel. The recent violence undoubtedly called close attention to the potential pitfalls as well, and will fortify, for now, Saudi Arabia’s assessment that on normalization, they have no reason to move quickly, and every incentive to wait and see.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2021/07/04/are-trumps-legal-woes-paving-the-way-for-a-new-republican-leader/

With New York indictments and growing signs Republicans are starting to move on, is Trump doing a slow fade out?

Former US President Donald Trump remains the clear leader of the American right. But cracks in this mighty edifice are visible and slowly seem to be spreading.

Charges filed last week in the state of New York accuse the former president’s family business, and its long-serving chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, of criminally avoiding taxes on perks that should have been reported as income.

The immediate impact is limited in several ways.

First, Mr Trump himself has yet to be charged with a crime, although a growing list of his closest associates have pled guilty or been convicted or pardoned for serious offenses. Second, no matter what happens to the firm, Mr Trump will apparently remain a wealthy man.

Finally, prosecutors are seeking to pressure Mr Weisselberg to provide evidence against Mr Trump. But there is no sign he is ready to do so. As with many white-collar offences, the prosecution will have to establish an intent to commit a crime, which is not always easy or possible.

White-collar defendants have a much easier time than run-of-the-mill criminals in claiming that they made a mistake, didn’t realise what they were doing or that their prosecution is either a vendetta or a difference in the interpretation of complex rules and regulations.

Typical sentences are much weaker than those given for more straightforward crimes like grand larceny. Mr Weisselberg, who is 73, could face some jail time, perhaps even a few years. But merely being indicted may not be sufficient at this stage to get him to flip on a man he has worked for since 1973.

Much will hinge on whether this will be followed by additional and more serious charges against the company and its employees. The indictment lists two other unnamed staffers, rumoured to be Mr Weisselberg’s sons, suspected of similar tax dodging.

If Mr Weisselberg concludes that he is in real danger of spending his golden years in prison or that his sons might be joining him in the dock, that could certainly restructure his priorities.

But if this is all there is to it, it is possible to imagine him simply hunkering down and fighting it out.

There is a significant disconnect between Mr Trump’s business and political brands, and the two do not always reinforce each other effectively. In politics, the Trump brand is decidedly white working class in orientation. In business, the name is intended to connote upscale (some would say gaudy) luxury and exclusivity. Mr Trump has alienated much of that market with his populist pandering.

But Mr Trump is also reportedly far more concerned with his political future than the fortunes of his company, which is now run by his sons and over which he has not formally resumed control since leaving office.

The good news for Trump is that he remains the most influential Republican. But he no longer dominates the news cycle as he once did

The charges themselves are a political blow, but also help to feed his grievance-fuelled narrative of being persecuted relentlessly and unfairly by unpatriotic forces in the imaginary construct he calls the American “deep state”.

So, these indictments against his company and senior executives could prove a wash: both embarrassing and validating, depending on the audience.

The good news for Mr Trump is that he remains the most influential Republican.

The bad news is that political trends seem to be increasingly out of his control and moving away from him.

He certainly no longer dominates the news cycle as he once did. Since he was permanently banned from Twitter, he has been unable to find an effective vehicle for his fervid outbursts.

He started a blog that was shut down after less than a month because not enough people were reading it. His associates have talked about a new social media platform, but there is no sign of one. And there doesn’t appear to be any meaningful movement towards a Trump TV or media network.

Two weeks ago, Mr Trump held his first rally since his election defeat. It was largely ignored by the media and he introduced no new ideas or themes. He did not meaningfully discuss President Joe Biden’s agenda or any other significant recent developments. Instead, he harped on the myth of a stolen election and his purported accomplishments in office.

He’s not the only nostalgia act drawing big crowds. The rock group The Eagles are also currently touring the US, performing the1976 album Hotel California in full, along with other golden oldies. They, too, will draw large and passionate crowds. But they won’t be setting any trends.

Meanwhile, all efforts to expose the supposed fraud are, to the contrary, reinforcing the validity of the last US election.

A Trump-supporting Michigan state legislator chaired a commission that investigated supposedly suspicious results in that state, which Mr Trump insists he won. Their report conclusively demonstrates that he lost, and notes that claims to the contrary are absurd, and even malicious, fabrications.

Mr Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, has just given his first substantive interview since leaving office, and said that while he had every motivation to discover and expose fraud, there wasn’t any. He dismissed the whole idea as utter “bullshit.”

Mr Trump, of course, is bitterly lashing out against all of these apostates. But that, too, will ultimately make it harder for him to maintain the loyalty of others.

Instead, evidence is mounting that Mr Trump went much further than previously known in improperly and probably unlawfully trying to overturn the election, with repeated phone calls to Arizona election officials now joining those on the record with state leaders in Georgia and Michigan.

The former president’s standing among Republicans appears to be gradually deflating.

Last year, polls repeatedly showed that most conservatives identified primarily as Trump supporters and secondarily as Republicans. Now, that ratio has inverted, with more identifying primarily as Republicans and only secondarily as the former president’s acolytes.

And, most ominously for Mr Trump, there is finally serious talk of a successor.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is being increasingly viewed as a potential national Republican leader. If this notion gains more traction, it may provoke the former president to try to cut him down to size through nasty, belittling attacks.

A year ago, Mr DeSantis would have been terrified of that. By now, though, surviving a Trumpian onslaught could be just what he needs to establish himself as the first really plausible potential post-Trump Republican leader.

A U.S.-Iran Nuclear Accord is Still Probable, But Will Leave Much Unresolved

With its presidential election over, Iran may now want an agreement, but the biggest issues may remain untouchable.

The carefully engineered “election” of veteran hard-liner Ebrahim Raisi to serve as the next Iranian president doesn’t change the fundamental equation between the United States and Iran at the indirect nuclear negotiations in Vienna or between Tehran and its Gulf Arab adversaries. But it does help clarify the delicate, finely balanced diplomatic reality and the dangerous confrontational alternatives.

In the long run, Raisi’s election does not signal good news about Iran’s intentions. Like his mentor, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Raisi has ruled out negotiations or other measures to restrain Iran’s missile development program or, most importantly from many Arab perspectives, network of militias and extremist groups throughout the region. Such tangential issues could be used as strategic bargaining tools in the nuclear talks. But the Iranian government, with power solidified by this hard-line faction, will likely remain dead set against compromises on these non-nuclear issues. And this Iranian position is not new or recently hardened. Iran always made it clear in talks with U.S. officials that those issues were not on the table; the only disagreement was among U.S. policymakers and analysts as to whether the U.S. government had the leverage to force them into the mix.

On the nuclear front, the current negotiations could still yield fruit. Unfortunately, that’s precisely because they are so limited. Washington and Tehran are seeking to revive the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement, which the administration of Donald J. Trump withdrew from in 2018, on what both sides agree should be a compliance-for-compliance basis. What’s essentially being negotiated is what would constitute “compliance” with the terms of the now 6-year-old agreement by both parties. The main question for Iran is what it must do to reverse the steps it has taken toward developing its nuclear program that go far beyond the restrictions stipulated in the JCPOA. On the U.S. side, it effectively boils down to how to roll back a range of sanctions imposed after the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA and the subsequent campaign of “maximum pressure” economic warfare against Iran.

Both issues are fraught. Iran might be able and even willing to roll back activities prohibited by the terms of the JCPOA and divest itself of new stockpiles. But it cannot undo the new engineering and research and development knowledge, particularly regarding more efficient and effective centrifuges, that Tehran has developed over the past three years.

The Trump administration sought to tie up as many sanctions as possible in legislative and administrative mandates and other red tape to make them more difficult to reverse and classified many of them as counterterrorism or anti-crime measures rather than being related to the nuclear negotiations. The administration of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is reportedly seeking to again ease all the reimposed sanctions that were originally lifted as part of the JCPOA and some that were imposed since. So, in both cases there are new developments that may not be easily resolved simply through compliance with the 2015 document.

Moreover, there is considerable opposition in both Iran and the United States, and doubts among U.S. allies in the Gulf region, about the value of reviving the agreement. Iranian hard-liners always maintained it was a bad deal for the country. For the United States, the JCPOA was essentially a chronological gamble, postponing significant progress on Iran’s nuclear program for 10 to 15 years depending on the specific issue. The value of those sunsets, effectively hoping for a contextual change in the interim that would convince Iran to abandon its nuclear program or at least allow for a meaningful extension of the restrictions, is a lot less convincing in 2021 than it was in 2015 given that six years have passed and Iran is at least as close to nuclear weapons breakout now as it was before the agreement went into effect.

For these reasons, compliance-for-compliance isn’t proving an easy lift. The big advantage is that both sides say they want the same thing, which, in theory, certainly ought to make it attainable. Negotiating compliance is a fairly narrow brief, but the sensitivity of the questions and political opposition are rendering it hard going. The most optimistic scenario for reviving the deal is based on the widely held theory that now that the election has been secured for Raisi, the supreme leader’s faction will be happy to allow incumbent President Hassan Rouhani to agree to terms with Washington and take the blame for unpopular compromises that will be required. Then Raisi’s government will be in a position to claim credit for the economic benefits of sanctions relief and score points by refusing to budge an inch on missiles and sectarian militia groups.

Raisi seemed to signal exactly that approach in the last presidential debate in Iran, when he said he was in favor of a return to the JCPOA but only by a “strong government” that wouldn’t compromise Iran’s national interests, clearly referring to missiles, militias, and other controversial topics. U.S.-Iranian indirect talks may have been bogged down, although some unspecified progress has been reported, in Vienna in part to help Raisi use this as a wedge issue in the election. If this interpretation of Iranian politics and strategy is correct, a breakthrough, at least for a framework, now becomes more likely before Raisi takes office in August.

If they get the green light, Iranian negotiators can compromise on at least two key outstanding issues. They can accept that the United States is not going to lift all of the post-2015 sanctions imposed on Iran and Iranians. And they can commit to restore full cooperation with International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and give them access to the surveillance cameras they installed in key Iranian facilities.

However, there are worrying signs that tensions are starting to overtake good intentions. U.S. and Iranian officials have been increasingly bitter in blaming each other for a lack of progress. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told The New York Times that the Biden administration was not willing to negotiate indefinitely and that if Iran continues with its current nuclear activities the agreement will become “very difficult as a practical matter” to revive. U.S. forces based in Syria and Iraq have recently come under increasing drone attacks from Iranian-backed militia groups, prompting U.S. airstrikes on both sides of the border that a pro-Iranian militia said killed four of its fighters. U.S. forces in northeast Syria were again attacked with rockets, to which they responded with an artillery barrage.

Despite all of this, Iran needs sanctions relief desperately given continued severe economic woes and the devastating coronavirus pandemic. Historically low voter turnout in the recent presidential election, in which all but a few carefully selected candidates were barred from running, is only the most recent indication of a growing alienation between much of the population and the state. The ruling faction is clearly preparing for the supreme leader’s succession. Khamenei is old and has been battling cancer for years. As one of his closest allies, Raisi may have been installed to succeed him or to possibly arrange for Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, to take over after his father passes away. Either way, sanctions relief and economic improvement would make such a transition far smoother and more manageable. So, a return to the 2015 agreement, even considering the challenges, is still more likely than not.

Where to go from there is harder to imagine. The sunsets on nuclear restrictions in the 2015 deal are fading fast. An extension of them is possible but would be far more difficult. For Gulf Arab countries, however, none of that is particularly reassuring, given Tehran’s continued refusal to put missiles or militias on the table. Iran is hardly going to be more likely to do that now, following extreme tensions with the Trump administration and Tehran’s apparent willingness to continue supporting militia attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria and the Biden administration’s willingness to hit back.

Some senior figures in the Biden administration have privately said forestalling the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon is the only major U.S. national security imperative in the Middle East, which is essentially the strategic position former President Barack Obama’s negotiators arrived at. Many Gulf Arab leaders would counter that attacks by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria not only target U.S. forces and interests directly but are fully integrated into Iran’s negotiating strategy on the nuclear question. From that perspective, these networks of militants armed with inexpensive and often precision guided drones and rockets, far more than Iran’s conventional missiles or even nuclear weapons, are Tehran’s most potent ace in the hole. But despite the lethality and impact of such weapons, the strategic reality is that they, unlike Iran’s potential nuclear weapons, probably do not have the capability of putting the United States on a path to escalating direct military conflict with Tehran. But, along with Iran’s militia network in the Arab world, these assets will remain major concerns for Gulf Arab governments, highlighting a continued gap in threat perceptions and strategic aims between Washington and its key regional partners.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/juneteenth-a-national-holiday-for-national-reflection-1.1245149

Federal holidays in the US are few and far between. It has been almost 40 years since a new one, Martin Luther King Jr Day, was adopted in 1983. So when US President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act last week, it was, as he might have said: “a big… deal”.

Juneteenth is not widely known outside the US, and only recently gained widespread recognition outside the Black community. Last year, when former president Donald Trump was considering holding a rally in Tulsa, the site of a heinous massacre of African-Americans, on Juneteenth he reportedly declared: “no one’s ever heard of it”.

In fact, Juneteenth has long served as a de facto African-American Independence Day, commemorating the long-delayed enforcement in June 1865 in Texas of the Emancipation Proclamation issued by Abraham Lincoln that ended slavery in the rebellious states during the Civil War.

It effectively stands in for the comprehensive national abolition of slavery, which technically occurred with the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in December 1865.

The point is not the date, but that the whole country should officially celebrate the abolition of slavery as a second national Independence Day, along with the traditional Independence Day on the fourth of July.

Some on the conservative far right complained that this will somehow undermine the unifying effect of the July 4 celebrations. Indeed, all limited opposition in Congress came from right-wing Republicans.

Yet the passage was swift enough, just two days before its first implementation, to take many Americans by surprise, as some were delighted by a sudden day off and others had to scramble to figure out what to do with their school-age children.

This is certainly another milestone for the integration of the African-American experience into the national narrative.

Some dismiss the new holiday as purely symbolic. Critics say so many Republicans were happy to vote for a representational gesture as a cover for the attack against voting access, and consistent opposition to other measures that would materially improve rights and conditions for minority communities.

Over time, clearly, national symbolism and stories have a profound effect. That is why they matter so much. So, a new federal holiday cannot seriously be dismissed as irrelevant.

The question is what shapes the broader national narrative into which it will fit. A profound struggle is engaged over how to define racism and how to understand its role in US history.

This year the Republicans embraced as a major theme a passionate assault on “Critical Race Theory,” which, strictly speaking, is a legal studies methodology that examines the impact and legacy of white supremacy in laws and regulations, and that critiques traditional liberal approaches.

CRT is now employed as a catchall by Republicans to condemn virtually all educational programmes to seriously examine the legacy and ongoing functioning of racism.

It is easy to understand why the white far-right seized on this heretofore obscure academic terminology. “Critical” sounds like criticism. “Race” itself sounds accusatory to many white Americans. And “Theory” sounds like silly academic gibberish.

Whenever there is any consideration of structural or systemic racism, the far-right now identifies the evil hand of CRT. And they rush to claim it condemns the US as inherently racist, irredeemable or evil.

That is a platform for anti-anti-racism, the rejection of any notion that racism remains a deep-seated, systemic problem that must be urgently addressed.

Republican state legislatures around the country are busy banning the teaching of CRT in schools, a basically nonexistent phenomenon.

A new Florida political-correctness law prohibits teaching “that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.” Apparently, any such observation is considered ridiculous or very dangerous.

Schools now “may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”

That cannot be honestly asserted because the founding document of the new nation, the Constitution, included several passages acknowledging the legitimacy of chattel slavery, including defining slaves as three-fifths of a person for political representation.

As American society sails into the dangerous waters of a long-overdue racial reckoning, it badly lacks a shared definition of what racism is, both in theory and in practice.

On the right, racism is almost always conceptualised as an expression of a person’s overt, personal biases or at most long-resolved and repudiated errors of the past.

By decontextualising the problem, this sets up the now-familiar claim that anti-racists are “the real racists,” because they are accused of casting collective blame against white people or suggesting Black Americans simply cannot thrive.

Some leading scholars and practitioners of antiracism on the left have reinforced these attacks by crafting a reductive binary whereby every entity, process or individual is either actively and programmatically anti-racist, as they define it, or is instead, ipso facto, racist. There is no middle ground. There is antiracism, of its own variety, and everything else is essentially racism.

That destructive discourse, especially when fully unpacked, begins to feel exceedingly accusatory to many well-meaning white Americans.

Many are required by their employers to attend anti-bias training seminars. These seminars can sometimes do more harm than good by making reasonable people feel ideologically browbeaten or accused merely on the basis of their white identity.

Anything that hints of an ideological struggle session is more likely to promote than combat racial bias and resentment.

Yet obviously centuries of slavery and decades of segregation and systematic discrimination continue to define much of American life.

Some “errors of the past” are very much realities of the present.

The impact of segregation was not magically evaporated by MLK Day. The haunting legacy of slavery won’t be exorcised by Juneteenth.

Simply passing laws to prohibit forms of discrimination that had been legally mandated and culturally enforced for hundreds of years cannot suddenly eradicate all of their functions and consequences.

They remain pervasive and resonate throughout American society to this day, particularly regarding essential social services like education and healthcare, not to mention policing.

Yet as suggested by the passionate battle over historical narratives – given their indisputable power to shape perceptions over many generations – if Republicans approved the Juneteenth holiday as a cover for opposition to voting rights and other crucial tools to combat ongoing racism, they probably only exchanged short-term victory for long-term defeat.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-17/arab-states-israel-have-a-stake-in-iran-s-election?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l

But the key to reducing tensions in the Middle East lies in relations between Tehran and Washington.

Iran’s Middle Eastern neighbors have a great deal at stake in the outcome of its presidential election on Friday. But the key to reducing friction in the region lies not in the outcome of the vote, but on the winner’s attitude toward the U.S.

No one expects any fundamental change in the Iranian regime: After all, voters only get to choose from a short list of contenders approved by the Guardian Council, a body that vets candidates for ideological purity. All the plausible winners are hard-liners; competitive moderate candidates were all barred from running.

The Iranian president has limited impact on foreign policy, which is directed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Relations with neighbors are often dictated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.  

But that doesn’t mean the election is meaningless. The next president will have leeway in implementing the broad directives that come from Khamenei. He and his foreign minister will set the tone for the way Iran interacts with other countries.

Iran’s relations with most of its neighbors have long been tense, and deteriorated into a low-intensity conflict during the second half of the Donald Trump administration. But a dialogue has developed over the past year between the Islamic Republic and its key Arab antagonists, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. If the next president is so inclined — and so instructed by Khamenei — he can use these discussions as a platform from which to improve ties.  

The Saudis and Emiratis are unlikely to be enthusiastic about the front runner for the presidency,Ebrahim Raisi, who is also viewed as a potential successor to Khamenei. A hard-line cleric with strong ties to the IRGC, Raisi has hewed closely to Iran’s hostile posture toward its neighbors.

But it is conceivable that a hard-line Iranian president could, under the only-Nixon-could-go-to-China thesis, find it easier to make concessions to regional rivals, and even to the U.S. Indeed, an accommodation with the “Great Satan” would make the Islamic Republic more likely to mend fences with its neighbors.

That, in turn, will depend on the outcome of negotiations in Vienna to revive the 2015 nuclear deal Iran signed with the world powers. The outgoing president, Hasan Rouhani, is keen for that to happen before his term formally ends in August. His successor would then be able to take office in a new atmosphere of dialogue with the U.S., which would have a huge impact on Iran’s neighborhood.

Raisi, who has said that executing the nuclear deal “needs a powerful government,” would probably prefer that the negotiations were completed before he is sworn in, leaving him to enjoy the benefits — mainly, the lifting of American economic sanctions. This would greatly improve his chances of tackling the problems he will inherit from Rouhani, which include a devastated economy, the lingering effects of the coronavirus pandemic and the growing alienation of the population from the theocratic state.

Better Iranian-American relations would also bring the next president some diplomatic dividends. Removed from Washington’s blacklist, Iran would be able to develop normal relations with its neighbors.

This would be welcomed by Arab countries that have maintained a delicate balance between Iran and the U.S. Qatar, Oman and Iraq would be able to strengthen their ties with Tehran without fear of antagonizing Washington. The Saudis and Emiratis would be encouraged to accelerate the process of normalizing relations with the Iranians.

In turn, the regime in Tehran might dial down its own hostility, and restrain its proxy militias from attacking U.S. targets in Iraq and its Yemeni partners, the Houthi rebels, from firing rockets into Saudi Arabia.

One enmity will endure, however. Whoever becomes the next Iranian president can be relied upon to maintain the regime’s hostility toward Israel, which is a core tenet of the Islamic Republic. Benjamin Netanyahu may no longer be prime minister, but there is consensus across the Israeli political spectrum that Iran represents a clear and ever-present danger.

This means the new coalition government under Prime Minister Naftali Bennett will likely keep up Israel’s persistent, low-intensity military campaign against Iran and its militia proxies in Syria — and efforts to damage the Iranian nuclear program.

The Israelis have struck some major blows in recent months, including the assassination of Iran’s top nuclear-weapons expert and the disruption of its main uranium enrichment facility. But if American-Iranian relations improve, the U.S. will press Israel to at least pull some punches.

But all bets are off if the talks in Vienna go nowhere. Iran would then keep enriching uranium to ever higher levels, compelling Israel to continue — or even intensify — its attacks. Saudi Arabia and the UAE would probably keep up their dialogue with Iran, but a normalization of relations would be harder to achieve without support from Washington. And an uptick in anti-American attacks by Iran-backed militias would make matters very awkward for the Iraqi government.

From Baghdad to Riyadh, governments in the Middle East will be keeping a close watch on the results announced in Tehran. But their hopes for reduced tensions in the neighborhood may rest on what happens in Vienna.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/will-americans-see-another-coup-attempt-in-2024-1.1240380

The idea is being rapidly normalised in a big section of US culture.

The words “coup” and “USA” traditionally only appeared together in works of fantasy and satire. But that’s no longer the case. The theme of an American “coup” is being increasingly normalised in US discourse through the conduct and language of former president Donald Trump and his allies.

More than 100 days into the current Biden administration, Mr Trump – who is now reemerging from a period of relative isolation at his Florida resort – has yet to acknowledge either his defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election or the legitimacy of his successor.

Mr Trump is struggling to be heard, particularly without his preferred Twitter platform. His dwindling band of aides pulled the plug on a much-ballyhooed Trump blog after only 28 days online, because few paid any attention to the incoherent postings. In retrospect, the brevity of Twitter imposed a useful discipline on Mr Trump’s effusive tendencies.

Yet Mr Trump and his allies won’t admit that he lost. The obvious corollary is that he actually won in November but, as he and his supporters insist, he was cheated out of victory by a massive, unprecedented fraud. There is, of course, no evidence whatsoever of this. There is, to the contrary, ample evidence that the election was particularly effective and clean, despite the pandemic and the biggest turnout in more than a century.

The latest fever-dream in Trumpworld is the inexplicable concept that some unimaginable something will happen that leads to Mr Trump being “reinstated” in office this August, or sometime thereabouts. Several of his backers have promoted this theory, and the former president seemed to refer to it in a recent public statement in which he vowed “we’re gonna take back the White House – and sooner than you think. It’s going to be really something special…”

Such an eventuality is not only fanciful, it could only be the result of a coup. There is no provision in the US Constitution for the “reinstatement” of any official. The only lawful way for a Republican president to replace Mr Biden is via the 2024 election. That’s it. Mr Trump cannot be “reinstated” through any normal constitutional or lawful process.

But The New York Times and numerous other major publications, reported the former president has been telling his visitors in Florida to expect his “reinstatement”, along with those of former Republican senators David Perdue and Martha McSally for some reason, later this summer.

These themes were amplified when his first national security adviser, retired Gen Michael Flynn – who was pardoned by Mr Trump for lying to the FBI about conversations with Russian officials – openly endorsed a US coup.

At a QAnon conspiracy theory conference, Mr Flynn was asked why what occurred in Myanmar (pronounced by the questioner as “Minimar”) – obviously referring to the February 1 military coup in that country – couldn’t be done in the United States?” “No reason,” he replied, “I mean, it should happen here.” Mr Flynn later denied he was suggesting a US coup, but he plainly was.

Delegitimising the outcome of the 2020 election and the US political process has become the main focus of Mr Trump’s political re-engagement and a guiding theme for many of his supporters. Their relentless propaganda against the US democratic system has borne fruit. A recent poll found that 53 percent of Republicans, and one-fourth of Americans generally, believe that Mr Trump is the “true president”.

This idea is the usually unarticulated subtext for a raft of Republican state-level efforts to restrict voter access and disempower non-partisan election officials. Even where, for example in Texas, Republicans won virtually every aspect of the election, highly restrictive anti-voting legislation is being adopted based on the false assertion that the 2020 election was marred by rampant fraud, at least elsewhere.

Indeed, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton implied that Mr Trump would have lost Texas too, had he not successfully blocked efforts to mail postal ballots to all registered voters.

The insurrection at Congress on January 6 was certainly some form of extravagantly ineffective “auto-golpe” – a “self-coup” that Latin American strongmen used to keep themselves in power in the 20th century. Yet that deadly riot, which sought to prevent Congress from certifying Mr Biden’s victory, might prove a long-term success, at least in laying the foundation for future violent disruption attacks.

The same applies to Mr Trump’s numerous efforts to overturn the election results behind the scenes, most notoriously by pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him non-existent votes he needed to win the state, reportedly saying: “Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.” Mr Raffensperger, like many other election officials in Republican-controlled states, has been disempowered since.

There is every reason to believe Mr Trump, who remains in solid control of his party, is preparing to run again in 2024. And if, for some reason, he doesn’t, any candidate imbued with his ethos and reflecting the current attitudes of the party would probably refuse to accept defeat.

A great deal of what Republicans have been doing, especially at the state level, as well as in terms of rhetoric and ideas, has been centred on dismantling the administrative, structural and, above all, attitudinal obstacles to rejecting and overturning an unacceptable result.

An American coup, long the stuff of fiction, reared its ugly head but quickly collapsed after the last election. Mr Trump won’t be “reinstated” in August, and Mr Flynn’s Myanmar-style coup by the military won’t happen either.

But all that misses the point.

What has been going on even before November 3, but especially after, is an effort to acculturate Americans to the legitimacy of extra-constitutional political interventions to make “wrong” things “right”. Anyone who still thinks a coup in Washington following the next presidential election is the stuff of fantasy or conspiratorial paranoia simply isn’t paying attention.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/east-jerusalem-s-sheikh-jarrah-heating-up-again-is-a-worry-1.1236647

Sheikh Jarrah is the Palestinian cause in miniature and an ongoing flashpoint

Everything that is most volatile and incendiary about the conflict between Israel and Palestine is boiled down to a quintessence in the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah. It is a small neighbourhood, about 2km north of the Old City, with its holy and historical places. But Sheikh Jarrah’s outsized significance comes from a persistent campaign by Israeli settlers to evict long-term Palestinian residents and make way for Jewish settlers.

Last month these eviction efforts were the flashpoint that ignited the recent round of violence in Israel and The occupied territories. Now, Sheikh Jarrah is heating up again and everyone should be extremely concerned. It can easily ignite another conflagration if things continue to deteriorate.

The confrontation that sparked the recent violence centres on a decades-long effort by Israeli extremists, backed by the authorities, to evict six Palestinian families from homes they have lived in since shortly after the 1948 war. Many of the families had previously resided in the West Jerusalem neighbourhood of Talbiya, but were, like almost all Palestinian refugees, prevented from returning to their homes after the war. The homes were then seized under Israel’s “Absentee Property Law”.

These refugees now face yet another eviction, this time from East Jerusalem. The trauma of dispossession, which has become a fundamental theme in Palestinian identity, is being reenacted powerfully, with the same refugee families displaced every few decades because of Israel’s evolving national imperatives.

The theme of occupation is highlighted in Sheikh Jarrah, too – the constant grinding and quotidian oppression and a consistent effort to replace Arabs with Jews in culturally, historically, religiously and strategically significant areas. And of course, the pattern of discrimination against Palestinians, particularly regarding land rights, both in Israel and in the occupied territories is forcefully illustrated.

The settlers claim that Jewish groups once owned the areas under question. Under Israeli law, Jews can “recover” territories lost in the 1947-48 conflict on behalf of such groups. There is no provision for Palestinians to recover any lost property, including that of these families from West Jerusalem. This form of discrimination is absolute, and entirely based on ethnicity, which is officially designated within Israel under the rubric of categories of “nationality”, such as “Jewish” or “Arab,” which is distinct from citizenship.

Among the most telling contrasts between the approximately 8 million Jewish Israelis and the similar number of Palestinian Muslims and Christians that reside in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories is legal status. The 8 million Jews enjoy a single, consistent and homogenous status, whereas Palestinians find themselves broken into at least seven or eight different categories depending on where they live.

The differences between Jews and Arabs invariably come down to rights to the land and rights in the land

All Jews in the “greater Israel”, including those living in “unauthorised” or “illegal” settlements in the West Bank that they have simply seized without prior permission from the government, are first-class Israeli citizens. It is as simple as that.

But the variations of legal status that are imposed on Palestinians living under Israeli rule are astonishing. There are almost 2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, who have many rights but face significant discrimination in terms of housing, land rights, education and a range of other prerogatives and services.

Then there are the Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem, who are considered residents of Israel, but not citizens. They have a relative freedom of movement, but lack many rights of citizens. Israeli authorities often note that they can apply for citizenship. They can indeed. And Israel can turn them down, as it often does. These residency rights are notably tenuous and often arbitrarily revoked.

Palestinians have different rights and statuses in Areas A, B and C in the occupied West Bank. And while Gaza is technically part of Area A, it functions more like a giant open-air prison run on the inside by Hamas and from the outside by Israel.

Even among Palestinian citizens of Israel there are special problems facing those deemed to live in “unrecognised villages”, lacking many services (including bomb shelters), and those considered “present absentees”, who were not, in fact, outside the country in 1948 but whose land was expropriated anyway.

The details are complex and excruciating, but that quick rundown illustrates how Israel’s plethora of different legal statuses for Palestinians, as opposed to the single and united one for Jews, serves as a lesson in divide-and-conquer tactics.

The differences between Jews and Arabs invariably come down to rights to the land and rights in the land.

The six families facing immediate eviction in Sheikh Jarrah expected a final Israeli Supreme Court ruling on May 10, and ramped up their protests on May 6. And those protests began to dovetail with unrest at the Al Aqsa Mosque connected to Ramadan restrictions.

On May 10, Hamas began to unleash a barrage of rocket attacks against Israel in an effort to seize control of the agenda from the Jerusalem protesters and turn the latest surge of resistance to occupation into yet another Israel-Hamas aerial bombardment exchange.

With the ruling postponed but expected soon, Sheikh Jarrah is again heating up, with prominent arrests of journalists and activists.

This is anything but a simple “property dispute” as the Israeli government characterises it. The potential for this iconic injustice, and a similar one in the Silwan neighbourhood, which together threaten to displace an estimated 1,000 Palestinians, to ignite passions, particularly in connection with nearby holy places, must not be underestimated.

And both Hamas and embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu benefited tremendously from recent violence. Some of their supporters may welcome more.

The Biden administration insists it is pressuring Israel to avoid such provocative measures. Given the recent arrests, they don’t seem to have been heard unmistakably enough.

All of Israel’s friends should be clear that these evictions, and the abuses they so powerfully represent, are unnecessary, indefensible and potentially unmanageable.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/why-republicans-are-stopping-an-impartial-inquiry-into-the-capitol-storming-1.1232323

The edifice of US democracy is burning down and political fire trucks are nowhere in sight.

During the Donald Trump presidency, many people thought they could hear alarm bells. But given the evolution of the Republican Party during a mere four months of the Joe Biden administration, the house of American democracy is unmistakably ablaze.

The manner in which a group conceptualises its past strongly indicates how it is likely to behave in the future. So, Republican narratives about the 2020 election are profoundly disturbing.

Last week, Republicans blocked the creation of a bipartisan commission into the January 6 mob attack that sought to stop Congress from ratifying Mr Biden’s victory.

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy rejected his own negotiator’s reasonable deal with Democrats. Then Senate Republicans used the inevitable filibuster to scupper it.

Their excuses were risible.

The commission would not also be investigating violence at unrelated protests after the police killing of George Floyd. It somehow was not bipartisan enough. And it would either drag on too long – though it would end nine months before the 2022 midterm election – or it is too soon to investigate the disaster at all.

There are three actual reasons Republicans quashed the commission.

They do not want to anger Mr Trump and his supporters.They fear what may be discovered about the culpability of some Republicans. And, especially, it might hurt their chances in next year’s midterm elections, in which they believe, and history suggests, they could make significant gains in congress.

Blocking a bipartisan commission will not stop investigations. Mr Biden and/or Democrats in Congress could set up their own investigations, augmented by committee hearings.

But Republicans can now dismiss any findings as tainted products of a partisan witch-hunt. That, clearly, is the key.

A bipartisan commission would have essentially crafted an official narrative of the insurrection that Republicans could not effectively disavow. Absent that, Republicans are free to dismiss any discoveries, and instead promote their own narratives, no matter how preposterous.

Numerous House Republicans are championing slain insurrectionists as “executed” martyrs, praising the mob, and claiming they were orderly, and even affectionate towards the police (that they, in fact, attacked).

Democrats have their own partisan motivations. Nonetheless, a bipartisan commission is essential to developing a shared national narrative about January 6. The categorical opposition to that by Republicans is a barometer of burgeoning disaster.

Though Republicans refuse to scrutinise January 6, they remain keen on official investigations, especially when the main focus is the November election itself.

Mr Trump and his supporters have convinced most Republicans that the election was blatantly stolen from him through widespread fraud. There is no evidence of any significant irregularities, and instead there is every reason to believe it was one of the cleanest, most effective and widely participated-in elections in US history.

A bipartisan commission is essential to developing a shared national narrative about January 6

Such hegemonic counterfactual narratives about January 6 and the election results suggest that the Republican Party mainstream is increasingly committed to fantasy over reality. The investment in delusion seems almost wilful.

Attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, key purveyors of the stolen election myth, have responded to defamation lawsuits by claiming in court pleadings that no reasonable person could have believed their preposterous claims. Yet most Republicans apparently do, or at least claim to.

Worse yet, new polls suggest 30 million Americans, predominantly Republicans, believe nightmarish QAnon-inspired delusions that a Satan-worshiping, child-killing, pedophile cabal, predominantly Democrats, runs the US government.

In Arizona, Georgia and elsewhere, Republican legislatures are insisting on recounting ballots that have already been counted multiple times in an appropriate manner by the correct authorities. They are outsourcing that task to private companies committed to the stolen election narrative but with no election auditing experience.

Many Republican state legislatures are responding to non-existent election fraud by restricting voting and terrifyingly, transferring power over elections from established officials to themselves.

Mr Trump could not convince Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him the extra votes he demanded in his notorious January 2 phone call. So now the position held by this lifelong Republican has been completely disempowered.

Such structural changes are obviously intended to prevent officials who insisted on upholding the law and the facts from being able to do that again.

The Republican Party seems to have become unwilling to accept defeat, and determined to limit voting, and ensure that, if defeated again, it can simply overturn those results.

States run elections but Congress ratifies presidential election results. On January 6, most House Republicans, 139 out of 208, voted to overturn the 2020 election results because Mr Trump lost.

Supporters of Donald Trump, including Jacob Chansley, right with fur hat, are confronted by US Capitol Police officers outside the Senate Chamber inside the Capitol in Washington, Jan 6. AP

Republicans could win a House majority in next year’s midterms. Given their passionate and paranoid election narratives, state-level structural changes and deepening extremism, it is difficult to imagine a Republican House majority confirming the election of a Democrat in 2024.

Tellingly, this dramatic deterioration has largely happened without much direction from Mr Trump. He is an unchallenged leader and symbol, but he has been strikingly disengaged.

Any hopes his absence would allow a reality-based Republican faction to regain control have been dashed. The battle within the party is over, and his extremist faction is solidly in command with or without him.

Perhaps traditional intellectual conservatism always served as a tissue-thin veneer veiling a seething morass of racial, cultural and religious indignation that is now particularly incensed by what it perceives to be a dramatic collapse in power and prestige in a changing America. Mr Trump may have simply pulled away the mask.

Democracy requires major parties that are prepared to lose. The current Republican Party does not seem willing to accept defeat and is therefore assembling an arsenal of political and other means – including the January 6 insurrection and routine dark hints of violence – to overturn an unacceptable result.

As a result, the American political edifice is on fire.

Decisive Republican defeats in the next few elections could force the party to change course or become irrelevant. But Republicans remain competitive nationally and regionally and are evidently willing to game, and even rig, the system as never before. At a minimum, they want to be able to choose when to agree to lose.

None of this is speculative. It is happening right now. The flames are rising fast, but no political fire engines are in sight. They may not even exist.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-27/abraham-accords-gaza-war-queers-israel-s-arab-outreach?sref=am1wYMj6

Amid a renewed focus on the plight of Palestinians, friendship with Israel is an awkward prospect.

As Israel takes stock of the fourth Gaza war, its new allies among the Gulf Arab states are counting the costs of their friendship — and the others are making fresh calculations about signing up to the Abraham Accords. The renewed focus on the plight of Palestinians in the occupied territories and of Arabs within Israel is putting the rulers of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in an awkward position and giving pause to their counterparts in places like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Oman.

The UAE and Bahrain had rational reasons to normalize relations with Israel last fall. For Manama, it was all about Iran. Ever since the late 1960s, when the Shah tried to annex Bahrain, its rulers have looked across the Persian Gulf with dread. The Islamic Republic’s support for organized, and sometimes violent, Shiite opposition to the Sunni ruling family greatly intensified their fears. With the U.S., their traditional protectors, growing ever keener to reduce its exposure in the Middle East, it made sense for Bahrain to ally with Israel, which shares its concerns about Iranian intentions.

The UAE was also mindful of Iranian threats, but it also shared Israel’s suspicion of Turkish ambitions; the Emiratis were especially nervous about Ankara’s patronage of the Muslim Brotherhood. They also reckoned that signing the Abraham Accords would strengthen ties to the U.S., in addition to giving them access to Israel’s vaunted hi-tech sector.

Both the UAE and Bahrain must have known that their alliance with Israel would from time to time be strained over the treatment of Palestinians and over its claims on Jerusalem. But it is unlikely they could have anticipated such an early — and tricky — test.

It came at the start of May, with a harsh crackdown against Palestinian protesters in Jerusalem. The storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque by Israeli police generated outrage across the Middle East, even among the politically quiescent populations of the Gulf monarchies. There was trenchant criticism, from Palestinians and other Arabs, of the states that had broken bread with the Israelis.

These sentiments, and their own misgivings, compelled the Emirati and Bahrainigovernments to issue strongly worded statements condemning Israeli actions in Jerusalem and the mosque.

The pressure on the UAE and Bahrain eased somewhat when Hamas unleashed rocket attacks on Israel, drawing attention away from Jerusalem and to another Gaza war. Because of its extremist ideology and propensity for violence, Hamas is widely unpopular in the Gulf. And while there is considerable sympathy for the Palestinian cause, Gaza doesn’t have the religious, political and cultural significance of Jerusalem.

Yet as casualties in Gaza mounted, especially among Palestinian civilians, so too did the anti-Israeli anger. Emirati and Bahraini blushes deepened as Qatar, with which they have often been at odds, used its media might — particularly the Al Jazeera network — to draw attention to the death and devastation wrought by Israeli missile strikes.

The cease-fire has halted the carnage, but Arab attentions have returned to Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa, where tensions are again mounting. For the UAE and Bahrain, more awkwardness surely lies ahead.

Arab signatories of the Abraham Accords can now be in no doubt that normalization with Israel has put them at the mercy of actors and events over which they have virtually no influence. This will not be lost on the other Gulf states that were, until recently, thinking of signing on. They may all have sound reasons to ally with Israel, but at the very least their monarchs will wait until the events of this month have faded in public memory.

As ever, most will look for signals from Saudi Arabia, the most powerful of the Gulf Arab states. The early, subtle indications are not encouraging: On Tuesday, an Israeli airline was denied permission to fly through Saudi airspace. Riyadh began to allow overflights shortly after the UAE joined the Abraham Accords.

A Saudi signature on the accords would be the ultimate prize for Israel and for U.S. President Joe Biden, who is pressing on with his predecessor’s policy of encouraging Israeli-Arab normalization. Riyadh’s imprimatur would make it far easier for others to follow suit. In addition to its regional heft, Saudi Arabia also has a leadership role in the wider Muslim world. But this makes it cautious, having more to lose from a miscalculation.

The Saudi leadership is obviously open to improving relations with Israel: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman broke a longstanding taboo last November when he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But as the kingdom’s day-to-day ruler looked upon the events of the past few weeks, he will have been aware of the discomfiture of his Emirati and Bahraini counterparts—and known how much worse it would have been had he put his signature next to theirs.